StudioDaily's Podcasts from the Front Lines

One of the biggest and most pressure-filled jobs on Christopher McQuarrie’s new action hit, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, fell into the lap of U.K.-based gaffer Martin Smith. McQuarrie was returning to the franchise for a second straight effort — the first director to direct two films in the series — but he was determined to craft […]

Director Ben Lewin says the biggest challenge he faced when making the new indie film, The Catcher Was a Spy, starring Paul Rudd, was his lead character himself. The movie spotlights a key time in the mysterious life of a unique historical figure, Moe Berg — a Jewish professional baseball player who spoke several languages […]

It didn’t take long for sound editors Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn to comprehend that A Quiet Place posed significantly different challenges from the blockbuster tentpole fare that has earned them both awards and accolades in the past. Indeed, the entire foundational narrative of John Krasinski’s new film is the fact that “it […]

Director Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion animated film, Isle of Dogs, is built on a foundation of Japanese cultural imagery, and that meant the visually obsessed filmmaker needed an intense collaboration with his production design team, headed up by co-production designers Paul Harrod and Adam Stockhausen. Harrod recently spoke to Studio for the Podcasts from the […]

As she sat down to chat with StudioDaily for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series, editor Tatiana S. Riegel, ACE, was only a few days away from an Academy Award nomination for her work cutting together Craig Gillespie’s new film, I, Tonya. Having no idea that honor was coming her way on the heels […]

Paul Austerberry was excited and terrified simultaneously when he was told in 2015 about Guillermo del Toro’s “then-untitled fish movie.” What eventually became a current awards’ season darling, The Shape of Water, was originally discussed with Austerberry as “Guillermo’s passion project — a small black-and-white film. I was a bit terrified, because color is pretty […]

Shooting for the first time in his career using two digital camera platforms he was not particularly familiar with, for a movie to be distributed through the Netflix streaming platform — Ritesh Batra’s Our Souls at Night — cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, BSC, found himself simultaneously blessed and challenged. The blessing involved the fact that he […]

John Carroll Lynch is, of course, a well-known character actor who has appeared, over the years, in films made by some of the top directors in Hollywood, including Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, David Fincher, and the Coen Brothers, among others. So he wasn’t without an understanding of the nature of a director’s job when he […]

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, Detroit, dramatizes one of the most violent and least-known racially charged police brutality confrontations of the 1960s—the infamous Algiers Motel incident. Bigelow has been quoted as saying she was pursuing a sort of “journalistic style” of filmmaking in telling the story, richly taking advantage of cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s constantly moving camera […]

First assistant cameraman Bob Hall, who recently spoke with StudioDaily for the Podcasts from the Front Lines series, certainly picked a complicated movie for his return to working with director Chris Nolan when he signed on to assist cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, ASC, FSF, during production of Nolan’s new movie, Dunkirk. Hall worked with Nolan […]